The White Widow: A Novel Read online

  “I am sure.”

  Now Pharmacy with the pow: “This is the time, the exact moment, to tell the truth, Jack.”

  “Why would I lie about something like this? If I saw two people trying to flag me down, I would have stopped and picked them up. If they were already dead when I came by, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to see them lying alongside the road because of the storm.”

  “Dead people don’t flag down buses, you are sure enough right about that.” Pharmacy scooted his chair right up to Jack’s. He leaned his big body and face over at Jack just like College had done at the Tarpon Inn. “Did you run down those two people, Jack?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill those two people, Jack?”

  “No.”

  “What’s gone wrong with your Fridays, Jack?”

  “Nothing. A string of bad luck or something. I am not in charge of storms. Somebody else like God or Jesus is in charge of storms.”

  “You are in charge of your bus, Jack. We pinned a gold badge on you the other night that said to everybody you were the best we have in charge of our buses. The best we have do not run over and kill people and then lie about it.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Run over people or lie about it?”

  “Both.”

  “You run over people maybe by accident, you lie about it because you don’t want to lose your job, your ass and go to jail.”

  Jack T. Oliver, Master Operator, felt nausea in his throat. But he also felt good about himself. He had, until this point at least, done very well for himself. He had stood his ground against Pop and Pow, Pow and Pop. He had not given in. He had not split or cracked or broken.

  They were checkers! That woman and the girl were checkers!

  Mr. Glisan, looking down in front of him at a folder on the desk, said: “Let me tell you about the two people who died, Jack. Anna Phyllis Fontes, age forty-two, a former probation officer in Fort Worth. Her husband, José Felix Fontes, is a sergeant in the Fort Worth Police Department. They have five children. One of them, Marguerite Susannah Fontes, age fourteen, was the other victim yesterday. She was a student at Birdville High School outside Fort Worth. She wanted to be a police officer like her father.”

  “Now she’ll never be anything,” said Pharmacy, still sitting up close to Jack.

  “What were they doing with a fourteen-year-old girl out there as a checker?” Jack asked. It was a reflex kind of question.

  “They’re smart, these detective outfits,” Pharmacy said. “They know that our bus drivers are smart sunsbitches and they know that they have to be smarter. Who in the world, what bus driver in the world, what Master Operator in the world, would ever suspect that a Mexican woman and her teenage daughter flagging down a bus in a storm outside Refugio would be company checkers? Who, Jack, who?”

  “Not me, that is for sure.”

  “How did it happen, Jack?” Mr. Glisan asked. “How did you run over them, Jack? I am sure it was an accident. Tell us about it now before it is too late.”

  Jack fixed his eye on a small Great Western Trailways bus depot sign that was leaning against the wall in front of him. The sign was beginning to rust away around the two holes where it had been hung. Where had it been hanging? How long had it been there?

  Pharmacy said: “It may already be too late, Jack. Vehicular homicide, two counts. Leaving the scene of an accident, one count. You could get fifteen years, Jack. Fifteen years behind bars at Huntsville. You ever been through the penitentiary up there in Huntsville, Jack?”

  Jack T. Oliver, Master Operator, shook his head slowly from right to left twice and then stood up.

  “I told you I did not do anything,” he said. “I am the best bus driver you have or ever will have, except maybe for Paul Madison. You should not have been wasting your time and insulting me by putting checkers on me in the first place …”

  “We put ’em on everybody, you know that,” Mr. Glisan said. “Nobody is above or below temptation. Nobody, and that means you and everybody.”

  “That’s a stupid attitude to have,” Jack said. It made him proud of himself again.

  “Only stupid people call people smarter than them stupid,” Pharmacy said.

  “I didn’t call you and Mr. Glisan stupid. I called your attitude stupid. You give a guy like me a gold badge and tell me how I am the backbone and the tailbone of the company …”

  Pharmacy stood, grabbed his chair and threw it across the office. “Shut up, Jack!” he yelled.

  Jack jumped, out of fear.

  “You killed those people!”

  “I told you I did not and I told you I did not and now I am going home.”

  He took two steps toward the door.

  Mr. Glisan said: “You should know something else, Jack. Something that should keep you thinking as you walk out of here now and go home. There was a third person involved in that check. It was a guy with a movie camera operating from a tripod under a piece of canvas he was using as a kind of tent to keep his camera dry. He says you drove right on past the two females who were trying to flag you down and he figured in the storm you didn’t see them. He says he was about to run out of film so he headed back to the car, which they had parked down Farm Road 682, for another roll. When he came back the two females were lying there dead. He didn’t see anything but he does remember hearing the sound of an engine from back on the highway. It was a heavy-duty engine of some kind. He said he didn’t hear much of anything else because of the noise of the rain and thunder and the wind.”

  “I have already said what I have said,” said Jack. “That guy proves I didn’t stop. I didn’t see them. It was hell seeing anything out there yesterday. I told you that.”

  Glisan said, in a voice Jack could barely hear, “Fortunately, the other agent left his movie camera running. So we probably will have pictures of everything that happened. They’re being processed now. We should have them to look at on Monday.”

  “Maybe you could join us for a viewing, Jack?” Pharmacy said.

  “You are suspended pending our seeing those movies,” Mr. Glisan said.

  “Suspended?”

  “You do not drive a bus again for us until we tell you to. You do not wear the uniform or that new gold badge of Great Western Trailways again until we tell you to.”

  Jack opened the door to leave.

  “One more thing, Jack,” Pharmacy said. “That breakdown of yours a week ago Friday. The mechanics here wrote on their report that it looked to them like somebody intentionally screwed up that ignition wire. Who would do something like that?”

  “I have no idea,” said Jack.

  “I have one more thing, too,” Mr. Glisan said. “We’re going to be trying to locate some of the passengers from your run yesterday. We’re hoping they might have seen something you didn’t see. The highway patrol asked us to do it. Do you know any of their names right off the top of your head?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. We’ll check the commission agents along the route.”

  Jack left.

  At the bottom of the stairs he came upon Sunshine Ashley. He was sitting in a chair in civilian clothes, looking sadder and droopier than Jack could ever remember.

  Sunshine saw Jack and stood up.

  “What did they get you for, Jack?” Sunshine said.

  “Nothing really,” Jack lied. “What about you?”

  “They said they had a movie they wanted me to see.”

  “Well, good luck, Sunshine.”

  Sunshine said, “I told you they would get us all and they did.”

  He told Loretta nothing of his meeting with Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy. He told her nothing of anything, except that he was going to Padre Island alone the next morning, Sunday morning, instead of driving his regular run east to Houston.

  “What’s going on, Jack?” she asked, quietly but with violence in between the words.

  “I’ve been suspended.”

  “Suspended? Wh
y?”

  “There was an accident the other night on Highway Seventy-seven and they want me to hang around for the investigation.”

  “I want to go to Padre with you.”

  “I need to be by myself.”

  “Tell me about her, Jack, you bastard.”

  “I don’t know anything about her to tell,” Jack said. It was an honest answer, one that clearly made Loretta even angrier because it made no sense.

  It made no sense to Jack either.

  But what was he going to say? How could he tell the real story to Loretta, his wife, a woman who had done nothing to him except love him, feed him and care for him? How could he say: Yes, it is a woman that has come between us, ruined my life and your life and our lives together. But all I know about her is that she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and she’s been riding my bus from Victoria to Corpus on Friday afternoons. I do not know where she lives or what she does when she’s not on my bus. I do not even know her name. Yes, I have touched every part of her magnificent body. I have done things with her and to her that I did not even know were there to do until she came into my life. But I have done all of that in my head, only in my mind, my imagination. The only parts of her body I have really touched are her elbows.

  “Don’t come back in this house with her smell on you, Jack T. Oliver!”

  Those were Loretta’s parting words to him. They were accompanied by the sound of the front door slamming.

  Jack knew what this woman, this Ava, smelled like. That was one thing he did not have to imagine. She smelled like she had just stepped out of a white porcelain bathtub with legs at the four corners.

  He was in the garage on the way to the car. As always, he had to step around Oscar, his favorite Santa Claus. It always made him smile to see him. Everybody in the neighborhood said their Christmas decorating was the best in the neighborhood, if not in that whole part of town. Oscar, whose eyes and nose lit up, was four feet tall. He went on the front lawn on one side of the house, the full-sized manger set with life-sized replicas of baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the three Wise Men went on the other. Eight strings of red, green, blue and white lights were hung around the windows on the house behind them. White plastic wreaths with red lights in the center went on every window. Jack had picked up Oscar free from a passenger in El Campo who was helping close down a dry-goods store. He told Jack about the Santa they were going to throw away and on an impulse Jack told the guy he wanted it. On the next run-through the Santa was there at the bus depot, Jack loaded it in the baggage compartment and brought it home. He named him Oscar after a high school shop teacher in Beeville he had always liked.

  Jack wondered if Ava would be as interested in decorating a house and yard for Christmas.

  And he wondered if they would let him do any of it at the Huntsville prison or wherever he was going to end up.

  He got in the car, a seven-year-old Dodge two-door, and headed for the beach, for Padre Island.

  Padre Island was his paradise. It was the place Jack had been going to since high school to play and to think and to imagine who he was.

  The Caller and everybody else kept talking about the development boom that was coming to Padre. Maybe so, but right now it was still a fifty-mile-long strip of isolated sand that followed the coastline from Corpus down to Brownsville, the Rio Grande Valley and the Mexican border. It was only two miles wide, and except right around Corpus on the north and Brownsville and Port Isabel on the south, where there were Holiday Inns and a handful of stores and houses, it was mostly desolate and unapproachable, except from the sea or by four-wheel-drive Jeeps left over from the military.

  There was plenty of room for everybody who wanted to come and walk or ride or fish or do nothing but be on the beach. Nothing but be on the beach was what Jack had come to do.

  He drove south on the beach road for the three miles until it petered out; then he parked and started walking south. He was wearing a pair of jeans, a pullover short-sleeved shirt and a pair of high-top white tennis shoes. After a few minutes he took off the shoes. It wouldn’t be long now. He came upon two middle-aged men tending fishing poles and then a young man and a young woman lying on a blanket.

  He moved off the rough path through the sand and went closer to the water. Oh, my, how he loved this. There was nothing more white and more bright than a spring afternoon like this. The sun bounced off the water and the white sand to make everything white and bright. Even a dark black suit would have been turned white and bright.

  A dark black mood would have been turned white and bright.

  Jack sat down on the sand. And then he lay down and stretched out, his arms high above his head, his legs as far down as they would go. Here I am, sun. All of me. Here I am, Jack T. Oliver, back for some whiteness and brightness.

  He could not count the number of times in his life he had come to Padre and stretched out in the sand like this. He came first with his parents and then with his junior high and high school classmates and finally with Loretta and some older friends.

  In the early days he ran as fast as he could into the waves and then wore himself out playing jump-the-waves. And he built forts and houses out of sand. His favorite thing to do was to lie down on the sand as the tide was coming in and stay there as the water came closer and closer, first to his feet and then over his legs and eventually over his face and head.

  In high school, he swam in the Gulf and drank beer on the beach. Some of his friends came with their girlfriends to make out, but Jack didn’t have a girlfriend in high school. But from about the age of eleven on, he had many sexual experiences on this beach, with cheerleaders and drum majors and English teachers and carhops and theater ushers. All in his head, of course.

  When the time did eventually come for Loretta and him to do it for real, it was to Padre he brought her.

  It was on this sand that he first put his tongue inside her mouth, he first put his hand on her breasts, on her thighs and on the inside of her legs.

  But mostly he came here to be by himself. He was a thinker even if he wasn’t a man of great ideas and heavy thoughts, even if he was stupid, even if he was a bus driver. He used his mind to go places and do things. His mother was the only one who really knew he did that a lot, and she said he should be careful with all of that imagining because it could lead him to real trouble someday.

  It was on this beach that he thought it all through to realize once and for all that he wanted to drive a bus forever and never go back to Beeville like his mom wanted him to. Jack had just met Loretta and was driving for Nueces Transportation when his mother called him out of the blue. She asked him to come home. Jack told her about the thrill he got from driving a bus and said, who knows, someday he might even move on to intercity, to the big over-the-road buses. She said she was sure that would be great. But weren’t there buses in Beeville he could drive? No, he said, there weren’t any buses in Beeville. Only school buses, and he didn’t want to drive school buses. She said Dr. EyeBob had truly accepted the fact that his son was not going to be an eye doctor who specialized in the new things called contact lenses. But it didn’t matter that much anymore and he wanted his only son back in Beeville. Come home and live your life with us, Jack, said Mrs. Dr. EyeBob. Jack listened to what she said and went out to Padre, lay down on the beach and thought it through to deciding he really did want to be a bus driver.

  Now that would soon be over too. He would no longer be a bus driver. What would he be? Jack T. Oliver, child and woman killer. Jack T. Oliver, hit-and-run driver. Jack T. Oliver, sex maniac.

  Jack T. Oliver, ex-convict.

  Jack T. Oliver, ex-son.

  He dug his heels deeper into the sand. He stuck the fingers of both hands down into the sand. He banged his head against the sand several times. He moved his butt back and forth to burrow out a deeper hole. He did the same with his shoulders and legs.

  Into the sand. He wanted to go deeper and deeper into the sand, his sand. He wanted to disappear. Where
is the water? Where are the waves? Cover me up, water.

  Cover me up.

  He closed his eyes. He tried to imagine the movie the company had of his killing that woman and her daughter. Black and white. It had to be in black and white. Color was for Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, Donald O’Connor and Vera Ellen. Black and white was for a woman-obsessed bus driver backing his ACF-Brill IC-41, bus #4107, over helpless Tamale women and children.

  He saw the bus hit the girl. She fell down and the right rear tires rolled on top of her, right in her middle. The woman, screaming, ran to her and was hit by the bus and knocked back. Her head hit the concrete. Everything was wet and then red.

  He opened his eyes. What he saw was bright and white and blue. Here came a cloud from the right. It was a bright and white cloud that would do no harm to the sky or to any person or thing.

  He tried again to dig himself deeper into the sand. But it was no use. He could go no farther.

  CHAPTER 11

  They told him to come to a room at the Hotel Surf rather than to the bus depot. The Surf was a clean second-level hotel on Corpus Christi beach on the other side of the port. The main hotels were on the west side, the downtown side.

  There was a third man in the room with Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy. Jack caught the name as Peck. Mr. Peck of Schoellkopf-Greene Detective Agency Inc. He was short, trim and dressed in a dark brown suit like a cop.

  The room was larger than a standard Hotel Milam room. It had two large double beds plus a sitting area with a couch and two or three chairs around a table. There was a movie projector on the table and a portable movie screen unrolled and ready against a far wall.

  “Want to see our little movie, Jack?” Mr. Glisan asked after they all sat down.

  It was a question Jack had not come prepared to answer. He had assumed he had to watch the movie. He assumed he had no choice. He assumed it was part of the punishment, the sentence, the end.

  “No,” he said. “Not if I don’t have to.”